DarrenByrne.com

I’m having an odd sense of déjà vu. At the exact moment I clicked on the ‘Write New Post’, something triggered in my brain and I felt as though I had done all of this before – all of this, in precise detail…the same bunch of links open on my desktop, the search for a ‘milestone’ image, the bloggery. I feel certain that I dreamed all of this, maybe years ago.

I know what you’re thinking and I haven’t gone mad, nor am I drinking at the moment. I really am having some king of Matrix moment.

Perhaps it has something to do with the subject matter of this post. I have been thinking back over the past two months of blogging, as this is an important post for me (is it possible to be nostalgic over the immediate past?). This is my 100th post!!!

At the end of February, Mr Doyle informed me he was dragging me to the Blog Awards, and I caught the bug. I wasted no time in opening my life up to the online world, discussing my adoption, my theatre going, my college worries and my thoughts on blogging.

More importantly, I discovered I was not alone. Grannymar, Grandad, Alexia and the Lionesskeeper; Ken, Ross, Anthony and Ben; Laura, Elly, K8 and another Darren; all bloggers in a landscape that seems to change and expand for me everyday.

It’s been particularly pleasing to meet a few of my fellow bloggers at the Big Yellow Helium Balloon Night Out (and the bits I forgot) and at Ellybabe’s Birthday. I hope to be able to get to Alexia’s Bloggers’ Night Out on Saturday too.

In recent times, Lottie has even picked up her quill (or whatever the www version is) and this week sees Andrew open up his life on his blog, Chancing My Arm. A very funny and inciteful insightful guy, I recommend keeping an eye on what he gets up to.

So, what of the future? I’ll keep reviewing movies and any new music that comes my way (I’ve just downloaded Band of Horses, under Andrew’s recommendation, so we’ll see how that goes). I hope to talk more about adoption – my experiences, those of parents who have adopted and also those of people trying to adopt at the moment (Siobhan White writes an excellent piece in today’s Indo). I’m going to talk more about my creative journey – I WILL LEARN TO PLAY THE GUITAR!! And I’m looking forward to giving my first post as Gaeilge (we start our Irish lessons in two weeks). Oh, I’ve been working on my first podcast too, Ken will be delighted to know.

So, thank you very much to everyone who has read my blog across the last 100 posts, and especially thank you to those who commented. The biggest thanks must go to the miniscule in stature, but huge in life Darragh Doyle. So, raise a glass to my next 100 posts and please, spread the word.

If anyone want to drop me a line, email me at mail@ my domain or just leave a comment.

It’s tough to admit, it’s a dark disturbing and, some would say, sickening secret – I’m a Eurovision fan.

Some of my fondest memories of being a child include being gathered around in front of the TV excitedly watching the results of the Eurovision each year. We would shout at the screen, place bets (I won over three pounds one year!!), and laugh at the awfulness of most of the songs.

As I’ve gotten older, my interest wained and I missed the show entirely for a year or two, but in 2006 I got hooked again.  It’s criminal that LT United’s We Are the Winners didn’t win, and wonderful that Ireland was the only country who got the humour enough to give it 12 points.

This year, however, humour, irony and social commentary are nowhere near good enough reasons for putting that awful piece of shite, Irelande Douze Pointe, into the competition.  I, for one, will be hoping we don’t even make it to the final.

It won’t stop me watching the show though!!!

Finding time to write these blogs can be tough and I do wonder how so many bloggers can write at such length while also having a social life.

Running for the bus on Friday after work, trying desperately to get home early (knowing we had a long journey ahead that evening), my mind was attempting to formulate its thoughts on TodayFM, some old movies and the influence of blogging on the lives of the common man. I used the hour’s bus ride home to write a couple of posts for the weekend and when I got home, I set them to publish at intervals over Saturday and Sunday. Is this how other people do it? Maybe I just need to find my rhythm and routine.

We finally set off (Lottie, Mary and I) at 8 o’clock on Friday evening, heading for Waterford to visit R and her boyfriend, Brian. And what ensued was a brilliant weekend of copious alcohol intake and long conversations (some meaningful, most meaningless) deep into the night. In contrast with many of our weekends away with friends, MarioKart, Singstar, Karaoke, even the TV barely featured. It was a good old fashioned talk-a-load-of-crap sojourn.

R is a girl I was friends with many years ago, when we were all praying for an end to our school days. We met when our two groups of friends combined for nights out and always got on very well together. In 2000, when Lottie and I abandoned Wicklow in favour of the Big Smoke, I lost touch with even my best friends at the time, so it is hardly shocking that my associations with R fell by the wayside too. Early last year, thanks to the forums I frequented, I began chatting with an argumentative, feisty and brilliant girl. It took us a very short time to recognise each other and instantly renewed our friendship. No, we formed a new friendship, in fact. Void of any pretence or veiled intentions – she became one of my best mates.

Last August, I think, she began seeing Brian, a truly lovely guy, who I immediately clicked with. He’s odd, attention seeking, nerdish and bookish and loves his movies – we were destined to hit it off.

So, Saturday night saw us dine out in a wonderful Asian restaurant in Waterford city (it is a city, isn’t it?) to celebrate Brian’s birthday. The food was wonderful, the drink flowed freely and the company was perfect.

Happy Birthday, Sir, and thank you both for having us down for the weekend.

My working morning begins as I give the dodgy radio on the mantelpiece in my office a good bash to turn it on. Unless my co-worker has been trying to annoy me by tuning in 98FM, it will be pre-tuned and I will be greeted by the sound of Ray D’Arcy saying something awkward and sounding embarrassed about it. Ray D’Arcy: Ireland’s answer to Hugh Grant in Four Weddings (and pretty much anything else he’s in).

Together with Will ‘There’s a Way‘ Hanafin, Mairead ‘I’ve Got a Fancy TV Career Now‘ Farrell and Jenny ‘Ray, Stop That‘ Kelly, the show’s often inciteful, often ludicrous chatter and interviews provide invariably riveting radio. I’d be lost without this show to start my day.

At midday, I switch off the professional, responsible and respectable TodayFM and turn on something that resembles a hospital radio station in an asylum where the inmates have taken over the airwaves. Ray Foley’s, ‘just a bit of fun for your lunchtime’, is fantastic. When heard Foley was moving from his late night show, the Blast, to an afternoon show, I was both thrilled and nervous. There was no way he could take his zany, risque and altogether collegic radio show and transfer it to a mainstream slot, without losing his edge. Happily, I was wrong.

Foley, JP and Adelle (and Ann) are all about the fun. I laugh my way through the afternoon listening to the show. And Foley’s blog is one of my favourite subscriptions (of course it doesn’t compare with Mr. Rick’s).

The only real kink in todayFM’s armour comes in the afternoon with Tony Fenton. He’s a real old fashioned DJ and sounds awkward and out of place. Trying desperately to pick up the pace of Foley’s show, he succeeds at being a mere stopgap between Ray’s show and The Last Word at 4.30. And while he does at least play some good music, the only real reason I listen is that I’m too lazy to switch over to Rick O’Shea on 2FM.

Matt Cooper’s Last Word is a definite change of pace. It’s a talk show that doesn’t sound like they gave Dr Phil a Irish radio slot, nor does it sound like some stuffy ‘we only want to talk about classical music and theatre‘ arts show. They discuss relevant events from the day’s news and have significant guests with a presenter who can play devil’s advocate on any topic, without sounding like an argumentative fool. More than once I have stayed in work late just to hear the conclusion to some heated debate.

There was a time I would attempt to listen to the radio on the DART in the morning and evening, but the reception was erratic and intermittent, so I settled on iPoddery and reading the newspaper. So, sadly, I miss out on the brilliant Ian Dempsey in the mornings, but his podcasts are available for free via iTunes, which is a bonus.

In the car, Lottie (with her radio remote on the steering wheel) tends to channel surf, looking for Beyonce and Britney tracks, but we generally revert to TodayFM before long. The Tom Dunne Show is music radio at its best. He plays great classic tracks, interspersed with brilliant commentary and also introduces the listener to a variety of new music without alienating the masses.

TodayFM is a brilliant station and I am an avid fan. That said, I don’t have all the Bertie Gift Grub album, I never got a Bobble Head Ray, I don’t have a ‘Just a Big of Fun for Your Lunchtime’ T-Shirt, and I don’t have a Something Happens album. Can I still call myself a fan? I think so!

It’s just brilliant. It really is. The Wii is a masterful piece of engineering and it has been marketed by the best.

Apparently, a huge proportion of people who have bought Mario Kart on the Wii are buying a games console for the first time. Think about that. Surely no other game or games system in recent years has seen so many ‘lay people’ turn to geekery. Perhaps the DS, another Nintendo invention, can claim to be the leader that safely guided technophobic people into the promised land of gaming, but the Wii is the machine that will keep them playing.

We have the two wheels for Mario Kart and know how to use them. Gone are evenings of three course meals and a quiet glass of wine as we discuss the highs and lows of unified field theory (It could be true – you don’t know!!!), replaced with shouts and screams from both of us as we try to pass each other on Mario’s frenetic racing courses. And not just each other; the Wii allows gamers to race against each other all across the world, improving the experience even more.

Forget about buying Grand Theft Auto, it will just encourage you to go and kill taxi drivers. Stick with Mario Kart – fun for all the family. :p

Not long after playing the sleezy Griffin Mill in Robert Altman’s The Player and just prior to playing the iconoclastically hopeful Andy Dufresne in Shawshank, Tim Robbins further flexed his diverse acting muscles by playing the hapless Norville Barnes in the Coen Brothers’ The Hudsucker Proxy.

Joel and Ethan Coen have time and time again proved their wit and dark humour: Fargo, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski. With Hudsucker, they proved they had great filmmaking skills too.

Opening with a spectacular shot of snow falling over a beautiful city, we pan in over the rooftops until it comes upon the Hudsucker Industries building, with a huge clock about to ring in the New Year. And we are presented with a man about to jump to his death. The rest of this hilarious film is told through flashback as we watch the fascinating tale of Norville Barnes and what brought him to that ledge.

Barnes, a country bumpkin hick, hits the Big Apple with the intention of becoming a New York City executive. His timing is magical as he enters the doors of Hudsucker Industries just as the Hudsucker board determines it needs a patsy to run the company into the ground so it can buy up shares when the company goes public in a month. Not knowing that he is actually expected to run the company down, full of energy and completely incompetent, he tries his best to save the company, but with bad advice from big cheese Mussburger (Paul Newman) he is destined to follow the board’s plan to take the share price to the floor. Barnes hires Amy (the fast-talking Jennifer Jason Leigh, in a role very different to last week’s Dolores Claiborne) as his assistant, but unbeknownst to him, she is a reporter trying to expose him. The only kink in an otherwise incredible movie, Leigh’s grating portrayal of a 40’s or 50’s wisecracking strong woman is too over the top, but this only further highlights the brilliance of both Robbins and Newman.

The film is punctuated by sparkling art direction, fabulolus sets, snappy dialogue, and terrific supporting turn from Paul Newman, make this a classic movie that missed out on many deserving awards.

Reading the papers this morning, I spied that a couple of the bloggers were mentioned. Mulley and his big nose were talked about in the Indo, while the Metro interviewed Twenty Major.

Ok, so these are two of the more outspoken among the blogging community and are more likely to get some mainstream mentions, but it’s interesting to see the proliferation of the blogging world into the lives of the ‘ordinary man’.

Why is it that many of the journalists own blogs are poor on content? It’s as if these ‘real’ journo’s look down on online media. Personally, 90% of my news intake come from online sources. Much of what I read is from sites fed by mainstream media such as the Indo’s site and RTE News, Sky news, etc – but the joy of being online is that you can seek alternate opinions and points of view. Often when reading the newspaper or watching television, I feel I am being pandered to, being told a biased view, and being fed news stories that execs feel I should be interested in, rather than actually getting any quality news.

I wonder how long it will be before print media is replaced by online resources as humanities prime source of current affairs. Will newspapers become nothing more than reference sheets, providing news summaries before directing us to Reuters, someone’s blog, a podcast?

As for the Twenty Major interview this morning, it was very poor. With an abundance of political, topical and probing questions that could be directed at Twenty’s controversial ‘creator’, this morning’s interview read more like a bunch of questions asked by a children’s TV presenter.

Lottie writes her views on today’s Not Guilty verdict in the John O’Brien/Meg Walsh case. Check it out.

Note to self: do not type a very long post on my PDA only to delete it before uploading to the blog.

I are very annoyed now!

In a disappointingly short final session at the Crucible this evening, Ronnie O’Sullivan took the World Title in two very short and uninteresting frames. It was a sad end to a tournament that saw some incredible Snooker from both O’Sullivan and his opponent, Ali Carter, who was his first World Championship final.

Making Snooker history, both players in the final managed to chalk up two 147 maximum breaks between them across the last few weeks. It was then fitting, perhaps, to see both make the final. Ronnie, playing some of the greatest snooker of his life, lacked any of his moody temperament and kept his cool to see off Stephen Hendry and Mark Williams (who has dropped out of the top 16 for the first time since the 1996/1997 season) into the final. Ali Carter had no easy journey either, seeing off Joe Perry, Peter Ebdon and Shaun Murphy in the final stages.

In the end, O’Sullivan had a comfortable 18-8 win over Carter and not even the streaker at the start of the final session could put him off his stride.

Via Twitter, Mulley shows us where his inventiveness and incredible time management skills come from: his mother. He also posts about it here.

I’m off to defrost my fridge.

As the cycle of life trundles on, so too does the life cycle of the meme. I was memed by B of PositiveBoredom and I have to write six random things about myself. He in turn was tagged by Raptureponies, who was tagged by loads of people.

Here are the rules copied from PositiveBoredom:

• Link to the person that tagged you.
• Post the rules on your blog.
• Write six random things about you in a blog post.
• Tag six people in your post.
• Let each person know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
• Let the taggee know your entry is up.

1. I think I broke my coxix when ice skating a few years back. It was my first time Ice-Skating and I was trying to impress a girl by going really fast, I fell awkwardly and landed arse down on the pointy bit on the back of the skate. Being a fool, I didn’t want to show that I was hurt, so I kept going around the rink – in complete agony.
2. I sang at a lot of school shows, at religious ceremonies, at the graduation thingy, on the grass verge at lunchtimes…anywhere really.
3. I used to be in a Samba band, specialising in the Tamborin (not Tamborine!). Rattat tat tat at at tat…
4. When I was young I had a huge crush on Christina Ricci as Wednesday Addams. I think I still love her!!
5. When my Granny was in hospital, with only a few days left to live, I was in an awful state. To take my mind off things I built a set of shelves for CD’s, DVD,s and books. Everytime I look at the shelving now, I think of her and smile. Odd?
6. I love watching Snooker and I am currently watching Ronnie O’Sullivan creating a flying headstart against Ali Carter in the World Championship.

So, I am going to tag the following people. Don’t feel you need to reply – it’s just a bit of fun for your lunchtime. Keeping with B’s ambitious tagging, I tag Foley. Maybe Lottie would be up for it? How about you Mr Ben? And I know how busy you are Ken, but you might take a few minutes out for it? What about you, D2? And how about the LionessKeeper?

Do you remember Dubstar? They were a 90’s band who apparently had three albums and a best of album, but in my head they were just a one hit wonder, who produced the great Not So Manic Now in 1995. I loved this track and I think it’s aged well.

If you are stuck for something to watch this weekend, you could do worse than head out to your local DVD store (when did we stop calling them Video shops?) and rent out Dolores Claiborne. Adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, this movie is beautiful, a perfect mix of stark storytelling and wonderful acting.

Dolores Claiborne, played by Kathy Bates, works as a maid for a wealthy and tyrannical woman in remote Maine. When she is arrested for the elderly woman’s murder, Dolores’ daughter Selena (Jennifer Jason Lee) returns from New York, where she has become a famed reporter. In the course of uncovering the truths to mystery of what has happened, as well as addressing some difficult questions from the past and Selina’s troubled childhood, much is revealed about their family’s domestic strife. As small town justice relentlessly grinds forward, surprises lie in store for the viewer.

There is an epic arc of a storyline that is reminiscent of some of Kings other work, Stand By Me and Shawshank Redemption come to mind, where the visceral horror of much of his other work is replaced by emotional trauma and the examination of human interactions.

Directed by Taylor Hackford, who was nominated for an Oscar for Ray a few years back, the strong script and incredible direction still only come second to the truly amazing performance by Kathy Bates. She may have missed out on the Oscar nomination for this movie, but her performance here far outstrips her maniacal turn as Annie Wilkes (in another King adaptation, Misery). Playing an abused wife and a put-upon house maid, she only rarely lets her guard down. Instead she maintains a gruff and cantankerous exterior, which does her no favours when going up against the detective investigating the murder. But it is in her relationship with her daughter, Selena, that we see the heartbreaking history in the characters eyes. Jennifer Jason Lee is not the greatest actress who has ever graced the screen, but as a foil to Bates’ Claiborne, she plays the tragic Selena perfectly. Young Selina too, played by Ellen Muth of the TV series Dead Like Me, is a harrowing character – her portrayal of the young girl, I guarantee, will bring a tear to your eye.

If you’ve never seen this movie, give it a go. I assure you that you will not be disappointed. If you have already seen it, watch it again – so much more to the relationships, the back stories and the beautiful film making is picked up on in the second and third watching.

I‘ve had a varied relationship with Talbot Street over the years. As I wander down the old Dublin street towards the last DART this evening, I can’t help but feel nostalgic.

Many years ago, as a child, we would make about three or four trips a year op to Doblin from Wickla and these were exciting times. Placing aside for a moment, the fact that any brief exodus from the cess pit of Wicklow Town was a welcome break, the times spent on Christmas Shopping trips or school clothes hunting were good times.

We would alight from a very-different-from-today Connolly Station and exit onto Sheriff Street before greeting the real train platform, the real route that led from the ancient train depot to the wonderful, modern and vibrant land of Dublin City Centre (the eyes of a child, and the naivety of youth cloud life with such wonder); we would alight onto Talbot Street. As a child I never knew Grainger’s Pub (perhaps it went by another name back then anyway) and I had a passing acquaintance with the furniture shops. There were no internet cafe’s (what’s an internet?) and there were no Halal stores or Polish food emporiums (surely Polish is used to clean shoes?).

The first shop we always hit (without fail) was the claustrophobic, the grimy, the stuffy, the frightening Michael Guiney’s. This would be the first of about eight trips into this particular shop that day and the majority of purchases that day would be made there. Bed sheets and pillows, summer shorts and towels; this shop had everything functional and practical – it was a child’s nightmare. And I could never understand why my mother would drag us from shop to shop to shop only to return there to get the things she had seen hours ago in the same place to begin with.

Moving on. We would spend much of the day in clothes shops: Boyers, Dunnes Stores, Penneys and if life was treating me kindly, if the Gods were shining down, if the wind was blowing in just the right direction, we could go into Virgin Megastore on the quays on the southside of the city (the well-to-do shopping district of Grafton Street was alien to me back then). I would spend my brief time allotted running around the store, looking at the many cassette tapes and video tapes, I would pick out a poster for my bedroom wall if the day was being kind. But we would always return to Talbot Street. If lunch wasn’t had in MacDonalds (as a child this disgusting ritual was, in fact, a wonderful treat – it must have been torture for my mother), it was in the Kylemore on the corner of Talbot and O’Connell Street.

Years later, in my teens, I saw less of Talbot Street. Being hip, cool and funky, we would get off the train at Pearse Street and hit the groovy, happening Grafton Street. I spent a lot more time in the Virgin Megastore than when I was a child, and I even discovered Forbidden Planet on the quays. I did not miss Talbot Street and on the rare occasion we would walk back that way to return to Connolly Station, I would shiver as we passed the two Guineys’ stores.

I got older (as people tend to do); I met a girl and fell in love. After a couple of very dodgy abodes in Killester, we moved into Dublin city centre. I think it’s fair to say that 521 Talbot Hall, above the Irish Life Mall, was our first proper home together. We loved it. It was warm (very warm, the heating was provided by the shopping centre below (it was not uncommon for us to wander around the apartment naked)). We had space for our stuff, which at that point consisted of about five new DVD’s, a Philips DVD player, a 14″ television and some clothes (we probably owned a crate or two of Heineken or Budweiser too).

We spent almost two years living on Talbot Street and or lives saw some dramatic turns in that time. The fifth floor apartment saw some amazing highs and some painful lows. I was not an ideal flatmate at the time but Lottie stuck with me through it all. As we emerged from teenagery into young adulthood we began to know what the strange words ‘career’, ‘future’ and ‘savings account’ meant.

Many nights were spent lying on the floor of our Talbot Street apartment, drinking cheap wine and listening to the sounds of the street below: the trad music billowing out of The Celt, the sometimes excellent but often distressing karaoke tunes burping from the bar on the corner. We would hear fights and screams and drunken renditions of the Green Fields of France permeate through the general hum of the city centre. And we loved it all. Perhaps it was because we went through all of this time together but, it’s fair to say, that both of us look back on our time on Talbot Street very fondly. It was our first real home together and I was very happy there.

And times moved on, we found a larger place on Pearse Street, but as I was still working at the top of O’Connell Street, in Cassidys Hotel, Talbot Street was still part of my life. I was still a customer of the street’s Chartbusters, I still picked up good deals in the small Golden Discs store beside the side entrance to Clerys. But the frequency of my Talbot Street touristry rapidly decreased.

Our move into our own place in Greystones and with our working life repositioning to the southside of the river, Talbot Street ceased to be a feature in our lives and I rarely give it a fleeting thought. But wandering down the street tonight, heading towards the last DART this evening, I can’t help but feel nostalgic.

My attitude to the street has changed dramatically too over the years. Where once I felt excited about the street that greeted us in the Big Smoke, it was replaced with a distaste, when I saw the street as a symbol of poverty and degeneracy. That feeling too gave way when we made the street our home. It became local, it became safe and familiar for us. Tonight, the old fears return. Junkies in doorways and bar brawls spilling onto the streets, prove that the street’s bad reputation was well earned and is being maintained. Surely, as the pathway into the city for many tourists, more could be done to improve the thoroughfare.

So, Iceland has become a pharmacy and the old derelict buildings have become Tesco and SuperValu with luxury apartments above, but this is still the same old street. I have a lingering fondness for the good times and the great memories Talbot Street has given me, but as the realism sets in (and the evening’s alcohol wears off), I can see that this is just another symbol of a subsection of Irish society left to fall behind. Perhaps it’s best not to look back so much, but focus instead on the hear and now. Perhaps that’s true of all things in life. Remember the past, embrace the present and look forward with an open mind to the future ahead.